LINGUIST List 12.1045

Fri Apr 13 2001

Qs: Peking Mandarin Survey,Wh-questions/Eng Dialect

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Dear colleagues,
I am a Ph.D. student working on temporality in Peking Mandarin. For this
project I use a corpus of spoken language data that I collected in Peking in
the spring of 2000. At the moment I have several questions concerning the
use of the subordinative particle de0, the perfective particle le0/la0 and
the verb lai2/lai0 in the corpus. The questions as well as the excerpts from
my recordings with the relevant sentences are to be found at the following
address:
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/wiedenhof/timemand/
The questions are mainly meant for native speakers of Peking Mandarin, but
comments and suggestions from non-native speakers interested in Mandarin are
also most welcome.
Katia Chirkova
Katia Chirkova
Leiden University
Research School CNWS
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2300 RA Leiden
K.Chirkovalet.leidenuniv.nl

I'm currently looking at the apparent lack of Subject-Aux Inversion (SAI)
in (some) wh-questions for a variety of New Orleans English. For
example, the following sentences are perfectly acceptable for this
variety:
Who that is? (cf. Who is that?)
What time it is? (cf. What time is it?)
I have two questions:
a) Can anyone tell me anything about the geographic/demographic scope of
this variety? I have heard that this is largely an African American
variety spoken in New Orleans and possibly Baton Rouge, but would be
grateful for any further information.
b) Is anyone aware of any work on this variety and/or other varieties of
English which may lack SAI in certain constructions? Any input or
citations would be heartily appreciated!
Thanks very much for your time,
Jenny Mittelstaedt
jhm3georgetown.edu